This
bird's eye view of the town of Hocsieu (modern Fuzhou) is from one of
the many travel books produced by the Amsterdam printer Jacob Meurs. This
volume on China was originally published by Meurs in Dutch, and then was
translated into English for a London edition organized by the scholar,
mapmaker and entrepreneur John Ogilby. Ogilby and Meurs collaborated on
bringing Meurs's travel books to English readers, with Ogilby supplying
the translation and Meurs providing the illustrations. The
view is done in the style of Dutch landscape
drawings, and provides not only a sense of how the town was laid out,
but also of Chinese daily life. The view depicts a town with complex,
sophisticated structures, an acknowledgement by the artist of the power
and sophistication of Chinese society. The artwork was done in Amsterdam,
based on descriptions by Dutch
traders, so the view has to be considered not as an accurate depiction
of a real Chinese town, but rather as a Chinese town as interpreted through
the imagination of a Dutch artist.

A number of the individual Dutch maps in this exhibition were originally
printed to appear in atlases such as this one, issued by Jan Jansson in
1645. All of the maps in Jansson's atlas are in the style shown here,
with latitude markings, a scale of distance, an elaborate cartouche depicting
inhabitants of the region, and decorative figures in the sea and other
blank parts of the map. At the time the map was prepared,
detailed knowledge of China was clearly limited
to the southern coast. In that area the map is reasonably accurate and
includes a large number of coastal towns. The interior of China and the
coastal areas beyond Formosa are filled in, but with very spotty and inaccurate
information. As with Jansson's India map, the number of towns and the
respectful approach to portraying Chinese people convey a sense of China
as a formidable society.

This hand-colored 1702 world atlas, primarily containing European maps
prepared in the workshop of French royal geographer Nicolas Sanson (1600-1667),
shows the spread of atlas production and publication into France. By
this time, atlases had become status symbols for aristocratic and bourgeois
families, and geographical knowledge was an expected part of a good European
education. Although most of the maps in
this atlas were done by Sanson, this map and several other Asian maps
were the work of French cartographer Pierre Mortier (1661-1711), who worked
in Amsterdam but who regularly supplied maps to the Parisian printer Alexis
Hubert Jaillot. The subject is the kingdom of Siam, along with several
key trading centers in the East Indies, together comprising parts of modern-day
Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, along with Kuala
Lumpur and Singapore.This highly detailed map is based on an exploratory
journey to Southeast Asia by French Jesuit priests in the late seventeenth
century, and was an important step forward in accurately depicting the
geography of this area.